This (Surprisingly) Stylish Ring Will Tell You When Your Phone Is Ringing

Meet the mastermind behind Ringly, which might just change everything.

It seems like every few months there's a new wearable tech product on the market. And with every launch we try (really!) to embrace it. But we know good design—and with the exception of DVF's latest take on Google Glass—wearable tech has not yet mastered "chic." So our eyes lit up when we learned about Ringly, a line of 18k gold rings with precious and semi-precious stones. Designed by an actual jewelry designer, you would never know that the rings also sync with your phone and apps, vibrating to inform you about important messages, calendar events, and pre-approved notifications so you can finally put your phone away.

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We hopped on the phone with founder Christina Mercando to learn how Ringly came about, what technology is in the works, and why wearable tech still has a long way to go.

Courtesy of Ringly

Photo: Christina Mercando, courtesy of Ringly

You've worked everywhere from eBay to the music industry. How do you think your multifaceted background led you to dream up Ringly?

[It goes] way, way back: My dad's an engineer, and my mom has always been a creative type, so I've always had this left brain, right brain thing. In college, I studied both fine art and human computer interaction, and I've always been interested in the intersection of arts and technology, from an early age. So now, it's coming full circle with Ringly. I always have all these crazy ideas, and I wanted to be an entrepreneur myself, so I decided that Ringly was one of those ideas. And it was the one that grew, so I decided to just do it.

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When considering the current, basically grassroots state of wearable tech, how did that inform how you built Ringly as something that people would actually want to wear?

I get that question a lot, and when I first came up with the idea, wearable tech wasn't as buzzy as it is today. It was never a reaction to wearable tech: I was just always missing calls and texts because my phone was in my purse, and my family was getting frustrated with me [to the point that] it became a running joke. And I was looking at my hands, and I thought, "You know, I wear some big rings. I wonder if I can make a technology that would fit into the things I wear every day that would help solve this problem and be useful?" And so that's where the idea came from. It was always about wanting to make beautiful things. It was never, 'How can we make technology beautiful?' I wanted to make beautiful things and put technology into them. And I think that's very different from the way a lot of technology companies work, because they start with the technology first and then design around it. We're using a very different approach by starting with the style and design.

But there are certain limitations with design, right? Because you have to put the tech somewhere.

Every decision, every step of the way, there's always a compromise. For us, it's really important that the tech is so small. Eventually, we want to work with other designers and brands, so the miniaturization part has been really, really important for us. And that's been the hardest engineering challenge. And then for design, you do have to work within certain restraints. So across the board, every decision we make is about the intersection of fashion and tech. Even with PR: Who do we go to? Or manufacturing? Fashion and clothing manufacturing is very different from electronic manufacturing. So it's always kind of about bringing those two worlds together.

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What are some of the other challenges you've faced—or are prepared to face—as Ringly launches?

I think the problem is just that there are so many moving parts in this business. You need the mechanical engineering, you need the electrical engineering, the industrial design, the visual design, the iPhone app, the jewelry design. It's difficult to coordinate everything at the end of the day, but that's what's so powerful about being on such a small team: Everybody has their specialty and we can all work together.

How does the design process work?

We have a jewelry designer on our team part-time, and I work very close with her on getting our vision out. She's been working in the industry for a while, so she has all the right contacts. We're in the diamond district all the time, picking out stones and picking out our rings. We've [also] been learning the process as we go.

Do you hope to retail the rings in boutiques or department stores?

Right now, with the pre-order campaign, we're going to be selling just directly from our own site, but after that, we plan to start talking to smaller boutiques and larger retailers. I'd love to be in some smaller ones first, just to showcase the product, and then figure out how we can be in bigger retailers. But for us, it's more about where you buy jewelry and where our marketers go. It would be more of the Bloomingdales and Nordstrom types, and less of the Best Buys of the world.

Once it launches, do you see it expanding to include more features?

Courtesy of Ringly

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Photo: Courtesy of Ringly

We have a lot of features in it currently: For example, it gets notifications, you can connect it to any app on your phone, and it can also let you know if it's too far away from your phone, to say that you've left it behind. Or, if you tap your ring, it can vibrate your phone, so you can find your phone in your purse. There are a lot of little things! But, yes, we have been looking into [other] things very heavily, and we actually just hired a neuroscientist to join our team to do some R&D and see what things we can put into the product in the future.

How do you see wearable tech changing over the next couple of years?

It's still in its infancy right now. We're seeing a lot of really cool products come out, but in order to hit a mass-production level, I think that they need to start looking better, and they need to start being a little bit more youthful. And for us, we think people are going to be buying electronics in the same way that we buy clothing today: You go into a store, and you buy the one that fits your style that day; even in terms of functionality, you buy the functionality that fits your lifestyle. We really see those things expanding. There are a lot of fashion brands today, and we think there are going to be a lot of wearable tech brands.

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